Investors Fuel OpenStack Integrator Mirantis with $10 Million

OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis on Thursday said it has raised another $10 million in venture funding, doubling the amount raised since December. The move comes as Mirantis recently released its configuration and deployment libraries called Fuel to the open source community under the Apache 2 license. The latest round comes from Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP Ventures, along with existing investor WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said it will use the funds to extend the capabilities of Fuel, a set of configuration and deployment libraries, which are scripts that let enterprises and service providers implement various OpenStack configuration scenarios ranging from basic dev and test to highly available infrastructure for mission-critical apps.

Fuel made its debut in March when Mirantis released an open source distribution of the libraries. When I talked with Mirantis Co-Founder and Executive VP Boris Renski back in March, he said the reason the company decided to offer Fuel as a free open source distribution was to follow the tried and true model of offering fee-based support to enterprise customers. Mirantis said it plans to release a commercial-grade distribution called Fuel Enterprise to those customers later this year.

A upgraded Fuel with an improved user interface and a single dashboard to manage OpenStack clusters is also now available, the company said. An improved interface supports automated hardware discovery and network verification. The new release of Fuel supports the new Grizzly OpenStack build, released back in April.

Mirantis has built some of the largest known enterprise deployments of OpenStack for the likes of eBay's PayPal subsidiary, Cisco's WebEx division, The Gap and NASA, which wrote and stood up the first OpenStack cloud based on its Nebula platform.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/06/2013 at 12:49 PM